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AMD Radeon HD 6450

Phoronix: AMD Radeon HD 6450

While we have reviewed several graphics cards from AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series, one of the GPUs in this latest family that we have not benchmarked previously is the Radeon HD 6450. The AMD Radeon HD 6450 is the lowest-end offering in this family, but how's its performance relative to other low-end AMD and NVIDIA parts? In this review we have a PowerColor Radeon HD 6450 1GB and are seeing how well this graphics card works under Ubuntu Linux.

"Hopefully the AMD Radeon HD 7450 will be a more compelling product..."

this is the last lowend card ... because amd wana play lowend stuff with the "fusion"-APU line.

the 7xxx lowend card get at minimum gddr5 and the 8000 lowend cards get XDR2 vram...

Yeah, as much as I hate to agree with Q here, I can definitely see this as being a problem. Product placement wise, why the hell would a company put out a chip that is slower than the CPU integrated ones? It makes absolutely no damn sense. It would be kinda interesting to see if switching to a faster memory would result in better results, although, I believe they already produce the 6450 in a GDDR5 version. Where the memory is concerned, it would probably give it the most performance to finally ditch the 64-bit bus on their lowest end GPU and move them all to at least 128-bit.

Product placement wise, why the hell would a company put out a chip that is slower than the CPU integrated ones? It makes absolutely no damn sense.

The HD6450 DDR3 is slower than the GPU in a fully-configred Llano but remember that Llano has the *fastest* integrated GPU out there not the slowest. If you compare it with other integrated GPUs (Ontario + competitors products) then it makes a lot more sense.

Originally Posted by LinuxID10T

It would be kinda interesting to see if switching to a faster memory would result in better results, although, I believe they already produce the 6450 in a GDDR5 version. Where the memory is concerned, it would probably give it the most performance to finally ditch the 64-bit bus on their lowest end GPU and move them all to at least 128-bit.

Yes, memory makes a big difference. The performance delta between DDR3 and GDDR5 varies wildly with application but GDDR5 is often 20-40% faster for the same memory size and memory bus. Benchmarks will often show a higher delta but note that the GDDR5 cards are sometimes clocked higher as well.

IIRC a GDDR5 card with 64-bit memory bus is still cheaper to build than a DDR3 card with 128-bit memory bus.

I think it's pretty clear this card is aimed at HTPC's and it's a great product for Windows users. When the gallium3D VDPAU stack matures (and I have faith that it will with AMD's dedicated devs), this could be a perfect card for HTPC and/or general desktop use on Linux. It should be cheaper then too

The sample that Michael got for review does have DDR3, but I'm sure that GDDR5 variants will be available for a modest price increase.

Please support AMD and their open-source strategy when possible.

EDIT: Oh, and there's a sentence that needs some editing on page2:

There is a two-fin pan header on the PCB if you are interested in upgrading the GPU heatsink to something that is passively cooled,

The HD6450 DDR3 is slower than the GPU in a fully-configred Llano but remember that Llano has the *fastest* integrated GPU out there not the slowest. If you compare it with other integrated GPUs (Ontario + competitors products) then it makes a lot more sense.

Yes, memory makes a big difference. The performance delta between DDR3 and GDDR5 varies wildly with application but GDDR5 is often 20-40% faster for the same memory size and memory bus. Benchmarks will often show a higher delta but note that the GDDR5 cards are sometimes clocked higher as well.

IIRC a GDDR5 card with 64-bit memory bus is still cheaper to build than a DDR3 card with 128-bit memory bus.

See, the thing is I would never compare it to Ontario's graphics because it is a desktop card while Ontario is integrated for netbooks. It is just with Llano being the desktop processor, I would compare it to a desktop card, such as the HD 6450. That being said, if the audience for the HD 6450 is just people wanting to upgrade an existing PC I could see that. I just can't see where AMD is trying to place it on its new desktop lineup.

Remember that discrete GPUs are used with CPUs from other vendors as well, not just from AMD, so it helps to look at the product placement relative to all the desktop systems out there rather than just the latest AMD products.

That said, I usually buy the midrange part (my last board purchase was an HD 5670) so I'm probably not the best person to be arguing the merits of the entry level discrete GPU

Also note that most of the Llano design wins were for notebook rather than desktop, although it does make a pretty slick desktop system. I don't think anyone is suggesting that an HD6450 is the right match for a Llano anyways.